How (not) to hire for AI
I had a call with a recruiter this morning who’s helping a local business in their search for “help with AI”. The recruiter had a good grasp on the complexity of that situation and I thought the points we covered could be interesting to a broader audience:
The company who engaged the recruiter knew that they “wanted to use AI”, but they didn’t know exactly what they wanted. The recruiter was honest here: Right now, they need someone who helps them decide what they need.
And that’s a pitfall right there. Many companies seem to hire for AI before they know what they’re trying to solve. Here’s a small decision-making framework:
Three questions before you hire
Do you have a specific pain point or general FOMO?
Specific pain-point: “This specific back-office process takes 5 hours and we’re losing deals to faster competitors.”
General FOMO: “Everyone’s talking about AI and we should probably get in on that.”
If it’s FOMO, you’re not ready to hire; you need education first, not execution.
Why? Because you can only measure ROI on specific pain points, whereas acting too soon on FOMO leads to expensive demos that never ship.
Can you maintain what gets built?
If the AI person leaves tomorrow, who can fix bugs, adjust prompts, add features, or monitor for errors? If the answer is "no one," you don't need a hire. You need a partner who builds maintainable systems. If you have technical staff, maybe you're ready for an AI-focused hire who can work with them.
What’s actually the scarce resource?
I’ve seen some job descriptions for AI roles that are really three or four roles in one:
Strategy consultant (figures out what to build)
AI/ML engineer (builds it)
Automation Developer (for lightweight automations in Zapier, n8n, etc)
Change management (gets people to use it, defines best practices, etc)
One person probably can’t do all of these well. Which one’s your actual bottleneck right now?
What actually works
Assuming that you don’t already know exactly which problem you’d like to see solved with AI, and are just beginning your journey in that space, here are a few ways to get started:
Talk to someone who's done this before. Bounce ideas off them, get pointed in the right direction.
Figure out where AI would actually deliver ROI in your business, not where it sounds impressive. Get that mapped out with effort/impact analysis.
If you already have a clear first target, skip the roadmap and just build something small to validate it works.
Conclusion
Most companies don't need an "AI person" just yet. They need three different things at three different times:
Phase 1: Someone to figure out what problems AI can solve (consultant/advisor) Phase 2: Someone to build the specific solution (project-based developer) Phase 3: Someone to maintain and expand it (could be internal hire, could be ongoing support)
